Page 96 of The Mars House

A camera drone was focused on them. The production team were only doing their jobs, he knew that, but all at once he longed for a few seconds with Gale where he could tell, for sure, one way or the other, if they were doing what they were doing because they wanted to, or if it was acting for the bastard show.

He glanced sideways, hoping and not that Gale had forgotten what was on the schedule today. Gale was watching him back, just as carefully.

It was as good a moment as any. He dipped his eyelashes in the sketch of a nod to say, yes, I remember.

What filled his head was how bad he was at all this. He hated being flirted with but he fell in love all the time, and never with people who loved him back—generally the ones who would never have dreamed of flirting with him. He was like one of those cats that only wanted to be stroked by people who were allergic to cats.

Gale was so violently allergic to cats that they’d probably have to go and lie down for a few days after too close an encounter with one.

And so of course, of fucking course, he desperately wanted this to be real, that would have been wonderful.

It must all have shown on his face, because Gale covered his knuckles, without any pressure. It sent a crackle of electricity up his spine, enough to make him twitch. Too late, he realized it looked like a flinch. “It’s all right. We’re not doing that,” they said, very quiet.

He sat still with his shoulder pressed to theirs, feeling relieved and robbed.

Gale bowed a little. “I think I’m going to have to go to bed. Good night, Mx Stirling.”

God, he was useless.

32 Cheers.

42

He was too tumbled to think about sleeping. Instead, he pulled on a heat suit and went outside. The cold was stunning after being so cosy indoors, and he had to stand still just by the front doors for a second while he got used to it, even wrapped up in heavy-weather gear. But he needed to walk. Exercise, outside, because it would be so unpleasant he’d be hard put to think about anything else.

Like an ability even to act a scripted romance. What would the producers be talking about right now? Probably swearing up and down the production room, yelling at Mx Francis and demanding to know how House Gale had hired someone to do one specific thing he seemed absolutely incapable of doing. He had been warned about this weeks and weeks ago, he’d known it was coming and even then, even then, he had just frozen, and Gale had had to rescue him. Again.

He had no idea where all the idiot baggage had come from. He had a dull feeling it was just that he’d never learned how to do any of this properly. At school he hadn’t gone drinking or partying or any of it, he’d just rehearsed and rehearsed, because he couldn’t afford to screw it up. He’d had friends, but not relationships. As a teenager he’d been bewildered by them and by the time he was in his twenties it was obvious that none of that would ever come easily, which had been upsetting, so he’d tried, but what he got out of it was mostly crushing dread. He couldn’t summon enough humour about it to even keep going to speed dating things. And now he was thirty . . . whatever he was, had he had a birthday recently? God knew: that was serious maths on a planet with no months. He was possibly thirty-four, and he’d had no practise, and no resilience, he felt raw trying to chase any of it down to real reasons, and he was, as bloody usual, falling in love with the nearest unsuitable older person who was kind to him.

What a joke.

He went slowly, feeling the altitude. It seemed to snatch at him in the evenings more than the day, but he couldn’t have said why. Not sickness; but a fluttery anxiety, the feeling that someone bigger was following you down a part of the canal where the shopkeepers weren’t paying enough protection money and the local gang had switched off the street lights.

There were bright lights in the forest; the logging crews were still working, and over the hum of the dust, the big machinery whirred and clattered. They were cutting up the felled trees. As January came into the haze of the lights, his shadow danced monstrous on the ground. Through his lenses, dim light trails highlighted where the paths were, and numbers moved in the air, telling him how fast the wind was, whether the dust was dangerous for machinery—there was a red warning—and the temperature. Hazy, because his mask was already dusty.

Someone took his hand.

He swung around, his heart lifting. But it wasn’t Gale. It wasn’t anyone. There was nothing there. Just the dust.

And then someone who wasn’t there banged him backwards into a tree, someone a lot taller than him, one arm pressed across his chest to stop him moving, and there was still no one there, and he couldn’t move, because whoever, whatever it was, it was pressing him flat to the bark, and then Jesus Christ Jesus Christ Jesus Christ, writing appeared in the dust on his mask visor, traced by an invisible fingertip, Chinese, mirror-imaged so he could read it inside the mask:

Find—tree—bear-carving—MAX—

He tore away and ran and ran, and didn’t stop until he’d lost all sense of where he was.

He sank down between the roots of a tree so he was enclosed, back to some roots, roots around him, curled up small, his breath whistling inside the dust mask.

Max.

Tree—bear—what tree with a—

Max was at the tree?

Max, alive and well and about to—what, to tell him what had happened, clear everything up after all this time, but then, who was attacking him and telling him—

No.

He did know. He had seen that tree on the wedding day. He had stopped beside it and admired the bear.